Peach Tree Times

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's recent suit against the Department of Justice over its non-compliance with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into the communications the DOJ may have had with left-leaning groups leading up to a lawsuit it filed in June against Georgia’s election law, has the support of a conservative advocate.

Raffensperger’s suspicions are well-founded, according to elections expert Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, and former Virginia attorney general. Cuccinelli describes himself as fighting "on the front lines of the conservative movement" for more than 20 years.

“The department has a long track record of colluding with left-wing groups,” Cuccinelli said for an earlier story for the Peach Tree Times. “Georgia is wearing all the white hats in this case.”

Some conservatives argue that records show that progressives' influence at DOJ is especially powerful in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division and goes back decades. 

In a 2006 letter to the DOJ then House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis) cited a 1994 redistricting case, Johnson v. Miller, where the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Georgia found that during the redistricting process an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was in contact with DOJ attorneys concerning the preclearance of the state’s redistricting attempts.

The court found communications between the ACLU lawyer and DOJ lawyers “disturbing.”

“It is obvious from a review of the materials that the ACLU attorney’s relationship with the DOJ voting section was informal and familiar, [and] the dynamics were that of peers working together, not of an advocate submitting proposals to higher authorities,” the court said.

The court added that “the considerable influence of ACLU advocacy on the voting rights decisions of the United States attorney general is an embarrassment.”

In 2013, the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) admonished the department over its filtering out hiring conservative candidates for positions in the voting section.

In 2010, when Barack Obama was president, the OIG found that the criterion used in assessing candidates for positions in the voting section “resulted in a pool of 24 candidates selected to be interviewed [nine of which were ultimately hired] who had overwhelmingly liberal or Democratic affiliations." 

”Of the 482 applicants,” the report said,” only 10 had identifiably conservative or Republican affiliations, and none of those 10 had any voting litigation experience.”

The report continued: “Although we found that the composition of the selected candidates was the result of the application of objectively neutral hiring criteria, the methodology employed during this hiring effort resulted in the rejection of candidates with strong academic backgrounds and with significant valuable work experience.”

Raffensperger’s office said that, to date, the only correspondence it received from the DOJ was an acknowledgement that it received the August FOIA request.

Under law federal agencies have 20 business days to respond to a FOIA.